Wee Eddie McPheeby Keith Coleman

Genre:Horror/SupernaturalSwearwords: None.Description:School can be an intimidating place for a ten-year-old; even more so when something malignant lurks in the stairwell.

​Wotcha, the Voice probably said as he passed.

But Wee Eddie ignored it, on his way to somewhere else. The interruption was insignificant in the light of his mighty purpose. He belted onwards through the echoing building, whose corridors felt so much better when not contaminated by his fellow schoolchildren. They were clean and full of potential adventure. This was his given domain when all the other kids were sitting, mock attentive, at their desks.

He laughed and heard it resound superbly off the walls. Wee Eddie was on his way to wee and he announced this fact to the apparently empty passageways. He’d had to ask three times before Miss Ogilvy let him abscond from the classroom. However, he knew he would get his way. It was either let him out to the bog or make him pee himself where he sat. He had done it before; though not this term, mind you. Not yet, but the threat remained a mighty weapon in his armoury.

Gotcher, the Voice might have said.

But Wee Eddie McPhee ignored it and laughed. Being ignorant made him feel self-contained. He bounded around a sawdust covered pool of puke and sniggered.

Next day the Voice accosted him again, louder: Wooja, Watsa, Wogga. The verbals contained a note of peevishness, as if the unseen utterer did not appreciate being disregarded.

The sound emanated from a large alcove beside the stair well. Eddie could not see clearly into the covering gloom when he zoomed past. Yet he had the idea that the incomprehensible Whatever was crouching beneath a pile of mouldering gym mats in the corner. He made a deal with himself not to respond to it unless it said something sensible. And next day it did, after a fashion.

Miss Ogilvy had asked him to run along and fetch the long armed stapler from Mr Wilson on level three. After she gave him the command she added, ‘No rush, Edward, please take your time,’ which might have been sarcastic. He took his time all the time, without any persuasion. It occurred to him that the weird Voice was her doing: a ventriloquist trap devised to ensnare his amazing, untamed ingenuity. He wouldn’t fall for it, if that was her game. Thinking about it, she constantly sent him on errands. Singled him out to go oot. First of all he thought nothing of the fact that it was always him. Then he took advantage of it, stretching it out longer each time. The breathing space from the hothouse of the classroom allowed his imagination to expand and populate the empty network of corridors with wild entertainments of his own making.

‘Long armed stapler,’ he bellowed out loud on the outward journey. Then he imitated Miss: ‘Edward, be a wee dear’ – (she didn’t really call him that, but the false familiarity made his imitation more enjoyably grotesque) – ‘go and fetch the long armed spider from Mister Wilson. Dinna let him give you the short arsed hairy one.’

The concealed malice in his impersonation made him realise that he was responding to Miss Ogilvy’s dislike of him. The revelation of her aversion, suddenly realised, swelled his self esteem. He barged purposely off the walls on either side, dislodging drawings and safety notices, like a human pinball, and trumpeted his echoing presence down the stair wells. He was expert at directing his most surreal and impressive sounds into those recesses where the reverberations would be most magnificent. And he instinctively modified the volume of his catcalls when he approached any inhabited room.

Mr Wilson was red faced when he flung open the door. He was obviously in the aftermath of a shouting fit and seemed embarrassed to be interrupted in his recovery period. The sullen looking class stared at Eddie. He nearly said ‘long armed spider’ on purpose just to make them laugh. But that wasn’t his style. He received the stapler and left. Behind him, Mr Wilson regained his composure and started bellowing again.

Up the rear stairs he made a forward motion sound like a roaring fighter jet. When he came to the place where the Voice had been he screeched to a stop. The recess was even more darkly entangled with rubbishy junk than before. He saw a big snaky lurking rope which had not been there before. Further back was a cowled box shape, maybe an old TV. There were cardboard boxes breeding in the deeper darkness.

Roger, the Voice said. Or maybe it said Watcher.

Eddie reversed and fell on his backside. It wasn’t because of the suddenness of the sound, but the fact it sounded close up to his left ear, as if the speaker was perched on his shoulder. He sat there stunned for some seconds. Then the voice said something coherent:

‘Be wise, Eddie McPhee.’

He stood up in surprise and stared to no avail.

‘Make a noise like a fart if ye’re real,’ Eddie said.

He took a step closer, then lost his nerve. The Voice didn’t respond. Eddie raised the stapler and fired a few rounds of miniscule metal into the darkness, making a gun shooting noise, ‘Pyaw, pyaw, pyaw.’

After a pause the Voice dismayingly returned.

‘Nice try, laddie,’ it said. ‘But we’ll have to try harder than that if ye want to kill me.’

‘I dinna want to kill you,’ he protested.

‘But ye will,’ the Voice promised. ‘I’ll make sure of it.’

That was enough for him, thanks very much. He ran off screaming, though the volume decreased as he sped onwards, until he sounded like a leaky, deflating balloon by the time he reached his home corridor. He thought he heard the janitor distantly shouting after him, but he did not look back to make sure.

Eddie was disquieted the rest of the afternoon. Thankfully, the teacher’s aversion to him meant that she did not question his distraction. He did not have to interact or concentrate on anything too much. For the last half hour the class had to sit on the carpet while Miss Ogilvy read a story at them. She must have thought sitting on the floor made it more cosy or something. But the proximity annoyed Eddie and made him fidget. It didn’t help that he was forced to sit at the very front, facing Miss Ogilvy’s fat legs, looking at the wayward hairs poking through her tights. He only just managed not to follow his eyes up those legs to the hideous place where legs terminated.

At home they noticed he was quieter than usual. But mum and dad would hardly have ascribed his silence to the fact that he was furiously contemplating. He was secretly thinking a great deal about the school. Systematically he considered all aspects of the place and shocked himself by discovering that he actually liked the school, though that did not of course include any of the teachers, the pupils or the headmaster. Was it haunted, he wondered? Information was hard to come by. It was an old building, or range of buildings, a red brick muddle built into a back street slope, and was full of rooms and corners which seemed to have been unused for a long time.

Mum and dad hadn’t attended his primary school, but Uncle Malcolm had. Uncle Malcolm was ‘away’ at the moment, so couldn’t be questioned about it. Mum said he was ‘on the rigs’, but Eddie recognised this as code for ‘in prison’. Trying to remember what his uncle said about the school was difficult and it took him several days to dredge up a few scraps of information. Mostly Malcolm had blethered rubbish about the school, which seemed to be an annex of paradise in his addled memory.

Eddie remembered his uncle saying there was a boy in callipers in primary one who got swung round in the playground by one of the big girls. The metal callipers caught the head of one of the wee boys standing nearby. Killed him straight away, of course. But Eddie was dissatisfied by the legend somehow. It bugged him that he could not possibly check out the details with anyone else. Then he recalled Uncle Malc’s tale of the teacher who put the belt on anyone who said any little dialect word like ‘ken’ or ‘hoose’, but who was mad daft on Robert Burns. He made the whole class recite all these old poems nobody could understand but him, sitting there crying. They found him dead, Malcolm said, face down in a Robert Burns book. But another time Malcolm said to Eddie the class had murdered him collectively for making them overdose on old Scottish rhymes.

Load of rubbish, Eddie thought bitterly. Next week he found himself getting cheeky with the nameless Voice as a way of circumventing the mystery of its existence.

‘C’mon here, Eddie,’ it sinisterly ordered on Monday.

‘Go away, knob-head,’ Eddie said as he ran past.

‘I’m warning you,’ it advised testily on Tuesday.

‘Go and suck yer mum’s bum,’ Eddie replied.

Its tactics changed midweek.

‘I love you, Eddie,’ it told him on Wednesday.

‘Paedo!’ Eddie shrieked in answer.

On Thursday and Friday it merely mumbled incoherently and Eddie thought it was on its last legs. But the following week it was back, louder than ever, though the Voice had changed. Now it sounded like his Grandpa Sean when he had throat cancer, raspy and scary.

‘Eddie, sorry to have to say this…’ it informed him on the second Monday.

‘Sorry, but I have tae. If ye don’t kill me, I’ll kill you. Doesnae matter where ye hide, I’ll come right oot an get ye, sure as buggeree.’

And there was no answer to that, was there? He bolted in terror and the Voice called after him, ‘Mind and come back the morn an we’ll talk aboot the ins and oots o how it’ll be done.’

Now that it had come to this, it was almost a relief. Killing a thing that had no shape, no body, and certainly no right to harass and terrify him, became an un-terrifying concept growing in his small head. It was an almost interesting prospect. But the Voice, the Thing, or whatever it was, seemed to have second thoughts. Next day there was no vocal presence in the alcove. By Wednesday he was worried something had happened to it.

‘What if it’s fell and hurt itsel?’ he wondered. Then he chided himself for being weak.

Eddie decided that the thing had merely gone away for a day or two to tidy up its doings. Likely it was saying goodbye to its fellow bodiless beings, having a shindig, whatever.

After the weekend it was back. Now it sounded squeakier, smaller, but still insistent.

‘Here’s what ye have to do,’ it instructed Eddie. ‘Get a big metal rod. See, there’s ain lying ower there by the skirting board, right up against the right hand wall.’

Eddie saw it and fetched it dubiously. It was a broken bit of steel pipe, cold to the touch. One end was raggedy rough, as if a metal eating monster had munched a bit, decided it didn’t like it, then disgorged it. The length of metal was only just short enough for him to handle, like a hollow javelin.

‘Come oan,’ the Voice coaxed. ‘Hurry up, ma wee Eddie, man.’

It directed him to the far corner where it was far too dark for his liking. Sometimes the Voice seemed directly ahead, sometimes to the left or right. He had to feel his way the last few steps, with the pole wobbling unsteadily in his grasp. The Voice said there was a table against the far wall, with boxes and bits and bobs piled underneath it, and that’s where it was lurking.

Eddie did not like the word lurking. He didn’t like feeling ahead with his free hand, in case it came into contact with that unknown something. And he didn’t like it when it said it was cornered, but be careful, Eddie – ‘dinna let me escape, ‘cause I’ll try and dart oot, an go for ye if I get the chance. Be awfy careful! Go for it!’

He did as he was told. With a yelp he rammed the lance into the dangerous space. It jolted into something not solid, but very real. A shudder was communicated through the connecting length of the pole and he dropped it when the vibration became too much for him. A scream issued out of the gloom and he never forgot that sound. Then there was a dreadful seepage of something liquid on the floor. He backed off, tripping up, falling over the clutter in the alcove. But he managed to avoid the terrible blood stuff coming into contact with him.

He heard a Voice, a different Voice, which rhymed gruesomely, ‘Oh, wee Eddie McPhee, what have ye done? Went and killed me, but now I’m free. Ye’d better run, son, or soon ye’ll see!’

And run he did, forever, while the unknowable creature grew and changed and came out of the lurking place it had been waiting. He would be okay, he was sure. He knew the ways of the thing. But for the first time in his life he thought about the unfortunate others, the poor little daft boys and shiny faced girls, and the pitiful stupid teachers strutting around the classrooms, all of them ready to be all ate up by the Voice.

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About the Author

Originally from Dundee, Keith Coleman has managed to slip down Britain and end up in Cornwall.

Keith prefers to write supernatural short stories, many of which have a Scottish setting and some of which have been published. With a long-time interest in the folklore surrounding the Scottish kings, he also runs two folklore blogs: Angus Folklore and The Ghosts of Glamis.